Quality Score
Last updated September 2026
Quality Score is Google Ads' 1-to-10 rating of an ad's expected relevance and usefulness, based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A higher score can lower the price paid per click and improve ad position for the same bid, making it one of the few paid-media levers that directly rewards quality.
Quality Score is shown at the keyword level inside Google Ads and combines three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Google describes it as a diagnostic tool; the live auction itself uses more granular, real-time signals that this score approximates.
01
Why it exists
Google's stated rationale is to reward relevant, useful ads with lower costs and better placement, so the auction is not purely won by the highest bidder. An advertiser with weak ad relevance and a poor landing page pays more for the same position than one with strong scores.
02
What actually moves each component
- 01
Expected CTR
tight keyword-to-ad match and compelling ad copy, aided by extensions and assets that improve clickability
- 02
Ad relevance
keywords grouped tightly by theme so the ad copy speaks directly to the search term
- 03
Landing page experience
load speed, mobile usability, and content that matches what the ad promised, not a generic homepage
03
The real cost of ignoring it
A low Quality Score does not just show up as a weak number on a report, it directly inflates CPC and can push an otherwise-competitive bid off the page entirely. Agencies chasing a lower CPC through bid management alone, without addressing relevance and landing page fit, are fighting the wrong lever.
Conduit treats landing page quality as part of the PPC build itself, not a separate workstream handed to someone else, because a technically strong ad campaign sitting on a slow or mismatched landing page leaves Quality Score gains, and the CPC savings that come with them, on the table.
A low Quality Score is often the earliest warning sign that an account's structure is wrong, ad groups too broad, landing pages mismatched to the search term, well before the client notices the impact on cost. Improving Quality Score is rarely about the ad copy alone, it is usually the landing page relevance and page speed doing most of the work behind the score.
Where this applies
